Hello and thanks for stopping by!

I am Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation’s Access to Justice Initiative.

My research primarily focuses on examinations of how individuals are empowered or constrained by the legal institutions with which they interact. I explore questions related to this relationship as it pertains to elite actors (e.g., judges, lawyers) and the members of the mass public (e.g., self-represented litigants). At the elite level, I principally focus on how the institutions that govern the relationships and role construction of judges and lawyers are designed and how they inform these actors’ decision-making. I also study how legal institutions shape the experiences of people who choose to formally resolve civil legal problems using courts.

Along with a group of Wesleyan undergraduates, I am working on an NSF-Funded project investigating state court responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can learn more about it in my recent book, Courts Unmasked - Civil Legal System Reform and COVID-19, now out with the University Press of Kansas.